Yigal Arens
Dr. Yigal Arens is Director of the Intelligent Systems Division of the University of Southern California's Information Science Institute, located in Marina del Rey, California, USA; Director of DGRC, the USC/Columbia University Digital Government Research Center; and Research Professor at USC’s Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems.
Dr. Arens received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. His primary research interests have been digital government, information integration, planning in the domain of information servers, knowledge representation, and human-machine communication.
In 1983, he joined the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. He joined USC's Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI) in 1987, where he first worked on the Integrated Interfaces project, a multimedia presentation design system combining text, tables, maps, and other graphics. For almost ten years he headed the SIMS (Single Interface to Multiple Sources) research group specializing in integration of heterogeneous databases and other information sources.
Dr. Arens has been Director of the Intelligent Systems Division, one of the largest Artificial Intelligence research labs in the US, since 1999. Starting in 2005 he is Director of DGRC, which he was Co-Director of since its creation in 1999. In 2002, Dr. Arens joined the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering as Research Professor. In 2003, Dr. Arens founded USC’s Center for Research on Unexpected Events (CRUE), which he headed for its first year.
In 1999, together with two colleagues from ISI, Dr. Arens founded Fetch Technologies, a company that specializes in extracting data from Web sites.
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Information Society and eGovernment in USA
Funding specifically for e-government research in the US began in 1999 when the National Science Foundation created the Digital Government Research Program. Since then, this program and associated ones have provided over $20 million to university researchers working in collaboration with government agencies at various levels. The DG Research Program is scheduled to continue for at least another two years. This amount of funding has led to the creation of at least 3 prominent centers of research in the field at US universities and to several international collaborations.
This presentation will survey the history, current situation and future directions of e-government research in the US that is being performed with the support of the Federal government and several large states.
In addition the presentation will survey current non-research-related e-government initiatives at the Federal level.
